Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/223

 Customs of the Lower Congo People. 1 89

Secret Societies and Men's Houses.

The raison d-'itre for Congo secret societies is lost in the dim and distant past. It may be they were started to hold in check some tyrannical chiefs who were oppressing their people, or to give mutual protection to their members from the exactions of some upstart class of nobles who wished to grind down the common people, or to afford their members mutual support against charges of witchcraft and the evil designs of witch-doctors, or to rid the country of witches, who were looked upon as the cause of death, disease, and various troubles ; or it may be they were organised to render aid to their members in their travels about the country for trade and other purposes, like some of our present-day guilds in Europe. On the other hand, they may have originated from a desire to oppress rather than to resist oppression, from a wish to extort money from non-members, and to levy illegal tolls on trade caravans (as the nkimba guild used to do in the near past), or to gain an opportunity to satiate lustful passions (which opportunity they certainly had in the ndembo secret society).

There was cohesion amongst the members of a society, but not between the members of the various societies. Membership in one guild gave no privileges in another guild. The members of each society were called nganga, or "the knowing ones." Sometimes there was a thin veneer of mystery spread over their actions, their languages, and their rites and ceremonies, and in some cases a good deal of fetish palaver. With their mysteries I do not think they deceived any but themselves, and, if the ordinary native accepted their statements and recognised their privileges, it was from fear and not from faith. The spread of missionary teaching and education have given a fatal death-thrust to these guilds, so that one never hears of them now, whereas twenty-five years ago I constantly heard of one or the other of them.